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Final Reflection

Jazz is Dead.

Or is it?

Some, if not many, scholars have stated that jazz is dead. It has gone way past its ‘cool’, way past its era. Yet, based on my research, jazz is now more alive than ever. It has undergone many, many changes, all of which have contributed to its greatness.

The researches I have done, of jazz throughout its lifespan, has indeed made me love it more than ever. My perspective on jazz has not changed since the very beginning. I still think that it is great, though I do have greater appreciation for it. I now know the struggles, the innovations, and the infinite aspects that jazz has.

I honestly do not think that the evolutions jazz has undergone have made it any lesser than it has before. Yes, there are barely jazz genres like Nu Jazz, but it is nonetheless jazz. I do think that jazz today is different from the jazz of yesterday, but the soul of jazz remains the same on all its genres.

Jazz is a music that unifies people. It is an expression of an individual’s deepest feelings. The genres that make up jazz only enriches its qualities. These sub-genres themselves are an expression, showing each composer’s yearning for expressiveness.

Jazz is not dead.

I completely disagree with the notion that jazz is dead. I think that those who say that it is, does not understand that the different subgenres are what makes up jazz, that the countless innovations and evolutions are part of jazz’s soul as an expressive genre.

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Jazz continued through the fusion-dominated 80s into the 90s. The 90s didn’t see much development than previous years. The only main development in the 90s was Norwegian Nu Jazz, which was always ranted by many articles and music enthusiast as barely, barely jazz. It is essentially electronic jazz, and it is more close to pop than it is to jazz. It is characterised as a straight beat-oriented song with no improvisations.

In majority, the 90s mainly saw revivals of past genres, such as the Swing revival and the Classicism genre which is basically Dixieland. 

In the early 2000s, Jazz Rap came out, which is Hip-Hop mixed with jazz. Its characteristics include heavy Hip-Hop beats and, most importantly, rap. It attracted musicians like Herbie Hancock and Kenny Garrett. 

As such, jazz continues to soldier on through the ages. Nowadays, many people claim that jazz is dead, and that its glory days are over. Yet, even if that is true, jazz is still within music’s heart and soul.

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In the late 60s - early 1970s, Fusion Jazz became increasingly popular. Fusion Jazz is basically jazz mixed with other musical genres like Funk, Rock, and other world musics. The piece above is composed by Chick Corea, one of the long-time well known Fusion composer.

The first Jazz Fusion genre that form was Jazz-Rock. It was done by combining elements from both Rock and Jazz, providing listeners with a mix between both genres. One of the most influential musicians in this genre is Miles Davis. His release of his 1970s album B****es Brew combined both genres, providing musicians from all genres with inspiration of combining their music with jazz. As such, this Fusion Genre gave birth to many different Rock bands. Chicago, for example, is partially based on jazz with its Brass/Woodwind section. Jimi Hendrix also utilised some form of improvisation with his band.

With the combination of jazz and rock, so did the instrument family grow. Musicians like Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock (Click Here for one of his famous electronic-jazz pieces) combined electronic instruments into jazz. Synthesizers, Electric Guitars, and Keyboards are now found in jazz.

Jazz Fusion is still going strong until today, with combinations of jazz and world music, jazz and rock, and even giving birth to the modern-day genre of Electro-Swing. Its ability to encompass other genres means that it has a large capability of growing without limitations. For example, experimentations with odd-time signatures were also commonplace in its latter years. A great example would be Robert Glasper’s Jelly’s Da Beener, a modern-day take on Contemporary Jazz, the young brother of Fusion Jazz. It has an odd 7/8 metre. An earlier example would be Mongo Santamaria’s 1959 Afro Blue, with its 3/4 metre, An early Cuban-Jazz fusion.

The 1980s also saw a bigger growth with Jazz Fusion, with greater developments in the fusions listed above. Smooth Jazz was also conceived in the 80s. It is characterised as combining jazz and pop, providing a very straightforward, basic melody. Improvisations were limited in this genre. Even so, Smooth Jazz gave birth to great musicians like George Benson and Al Jarreau (Who sadly passed away earlier this year).

Fusion Jazz is indeed a very, very, very great contribution into the jazz genre. Though it receives some backlash from jazz purists, the genre’s contribution into the musical world is very broad. Even today, many musicians like Rudresh Mahanthappa, Robert Glasper, and Kenny Garrett (Not Kenny G) continue to expand this genre combining it with other genres. It expanded the musical vocabulary greatly, as the introduction of new genres meant the creation of more scales and playing styles.

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In the 60s, another form of jazz appeared. Soul Jazz is jazz that combines blues and gospel. Its roots mainly sprouted from Hard Bop, mainly from the Funk Jazz subgenre. It can be considered as one of the most popular genre in the 60s, as it is the one most played.

Soul Jazz revolves around improvising based on chord progressions, and, just like Bebop, performers try to create an exciting performance. Unlike other types of jazz, Soul Jazz revolves around a rhythm based on a strong bass line.

Soul Jazz, while probably not as influential as other jazz genres, is still a significant aspect of jazz. It helped jazz come back into the mainstream in the 60s, where Rock and Roll was booming.

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The birth of Free Jazz came at the same era Modal Jazz did in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Its birth started with the Ornette Coleman Quartet’s release of their album, Free Jazz. One of its best ‘disciple’ is John Coltrane, who is also the father of Modal Jazz.

To put simply, Free Jazz is jazz without limits. When improvising, performers can play anything, without adhering to chord progressions. This means that the genre is essentially atonal, not written in any key or mode. Performers can play in any key, without caring about the chords. This gives the performers essentially unlimited freedom of expression.

Another key element of Free Jazz is collective improvisation. You can listen to this with Coleman’s Free Jazz album. In it, two quartets played simultaneously. This created the genre’s dense texture made out of the instruments playing together. During the improvisations, all forms of metres and tempo are ignored, which means that the performers can play in any speed and rhythm they want.

All in all, Free Jazz is probably the most expressive form of jazz there is. Its complete disregard of many of the basic musical elements used in other jazz genres make it groundbreaking, as it now prioritises expression than musical elements. This results in the genre to become very ‘deep’, as performers can express their deepest feelings through their playing without limitation. This itself allowed Free Jazz’s influence to span throughout the ages, even influencing many modern jazz performers. 

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The Ornette Coleman Quartet, NYC, 1962. Jimmy Garrison, Bobby Bradford, Ornette and Charles Moffett

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In the late 1950s, another jazz genre started to appear. Modal Jazz was spearheaded by Miles Davis, with his recording of the album ‘Kind of Blue’ and ‘Milestones’. 

Modal Jazz is just as its name suggests. It is based on modality rather than tonality. This switch from tonality to modality allows musicians to become more expressive with their playing styles, mainly in improvisations where scales are almost-always used. 

To better understand the significance of the switch, it is important to understand the differences between the two scales. Click Here for a more in-depth explanation.

Tonal scales have been the main type of scales used in modern music, including jazz. It centers around the Ionian (Commonly known as Major Scale) and Aeolian (Commonly known as Minor Scale) scales created generations back in the musical timeline. In this scale, there are only ‘majors’ and ‘minors’, with 12 possible major keys and 12 possible minor keys. It is used in many music within the Classical genre. Most pop music today uses this scale.

Modal scales, in contrast, do not have a major or a minor. A modal scale can be both major and minor, combining them together. It includes the Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, and Locrian scales. They contain different scale formations than tonal scales do, with a different step-half step interval (Here’s a good article on this) arrangement.

By using modal scales instead of tonal scales, performers are able to become more flexible during their improvisations, allowing them to create a whole lot of different tunes than those found in other music. It opens a whole new door towards the future of jazz and music in general, showing that modal scales can be used in modern music.

The piece above, ‘So What’ by Miles Davis, is among the pivotal pieces that introduce modal jazz. Though there were other compositions that portrays modal scale usage before these compositions, Miles Davis’ works are the ones ushering the new era.

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Another genre also appeared at the end of 1950s to the early 1960s, Bossa Nova. Unlike most other genres, this genre was created overseas in Brazil. A combination of traditional, folk tunes, it can be described as a soft, samba-like music, such as Cool Jazz but with Latin elements. This included utilising Latin instruments, such as congas, timbales, and bongos. Its dynamics were calm and its texture soft. It can be described as ‘Love, Flowers, and Smiles’.Another key contrast of this genre is its lyrics. Lyrics of this genre is often poetry-like, reflecting some aspects of Latin tradition.

This genre is first introduced into the United States in 1962, and it became acknowledged by the Western world. This genre is, in fact, one of the earliest jazz fusion genres. Though there are the Gypsy Jazz genre in France and the Afro-Cuban movement in the late 1940s as an extension of the Bebop genre (Click Here to find out more), the Bossa Nova genre is possibly one of the most well-known genre, one that is still found up to today. In addition, the Bossa Nova movement in the late 50s was one that helped pushed the Afro-Cuban jazz scene into prominence.

The introduction of these Afro-Cuban jazz genres helped expand the jazz vocabulary vastly by introducing and incorporating outside genres into jazz. It helped pave the way towards more jazz fusion genres. In addition, its instruments are still used throughout the jazz scene today, and even helped introduce Latin instruments into Western music.

A great example of Bossa Nova is ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ by Joao Gilberto and Stan Getz. Joao Gilberto is the frontrunner of Bossa Nova music, with Tom Jobim.

Jazz is a very democratic musical form. It comes out of a communal experience. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of beauty. - Max Roach

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Unlike the Funk Jazz subgenre of Hard Bop, the Mainstream subgenre is much more variative. It is a complete and somewhat-explicit form of bebop, thanks to the genre’s elements, such as its Bebop tunes, complex/unorthodox harmonies, odd-meters, and sophisticated rhythm. When a person talks about Hard Bop, they often refer to this subgenre in particular. 

The importance of this subgenre is quite great. Thanks to this genre’s freedom in creating new scale vocabularies, the genre affects other compositions greatly by expanding the scale vocabulary in jazz. In fact, the piece above titled Giant Steps by John Coltrane is a great example of this vocabulary expansion. Known as the Coltrane Changes, it centers mainly around modulating down a major third of a scale (Three Tonic system). Click Here to learn more about the Coltrane Changes. Explorations such as these are the ones that make Mainstream jazz very important and significant.

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Another jazz subgenre that appeared in the mid-late 1950s is the Hard Bop genre. Unlike Cool Jazz, the hard bop genre is much more hardcored, and is based on Bebop itself. The only difference between Hard Bop and Bebop is the genre’s addition of other music elements from Blues, Funk, Soul, and Rhythm and Bass. This gives this genre a much more broadly influenced style, though it mainly leans towards the Blues style. 

This genre is, in fact, created in reaction to Cool Jazz. Some musicians felt as if Cool Jazz is turning jazz into a more European genre, thanks to its pre-arranged melodies and lack of Blues. It was spearheaded by Miles Davis (Again), but has many followers, such as Art Blakey, the jazz drummer, and John Coltrane, the Tenor saxophonist.

There are two main styles of Hard Bop, Funk Jazz and Mainstream Jazz. Though the two are technically different genres, they can be categorised as Hard Bop. The example above by Art Blakey is an example of Funk Jazz, the more ‘restrictive’ one. Though still expressive, the genre mainly focusses on much more simple elements, such as only using Blues and Pentatonic scales, simple harmonies, and a simple rhythm like that of the Swing.

One of my personal favourites, part of Hard Bop:

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"Hot can be cool & cool can be hot & each can be both. But hot or cool man, Jazz is Jazz."

Louis Armstrong

Cool Jazz and Bebop are mirrors of each other, though they share some characteristics in terms of elements and scales. Cool Jazz is indeed a very broad genre, used even until today in performances, clubs, and even bars. In fact, many jazz musicians today compose music categorised as Cool Jazz. With a more arranged and less-improvised playing style, Its laid-back atmosphere defined the 1950s of America, even reflecting on the country’s cooler atmosphere after the end of World War 2. In fact, the genre is based on a strict arrangement like that in Swing, but combines it with the improvisation freedom found in Bebop.

The beginnings of this genre is quite subtle, starting with Miles Davis’ experiments of a calmer and cooler playing style, later compiled as Birth of the Cool. This genre continues to live on today, affecting future genres with its new relaxed playing style and its mainstream approach thanks to musicians, such as the Brubeck Quartet, touring college campuses and introducing it to the younger generations.

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Cool Jazz is the next evolution in the timeline of jazz. Developed by trumpeter Miles Davis and saxophonist Lester Young, it stems directly off of bebop, with its scales and rhythm used in Cool Jazz. Developed in the late 1940s to early 1950s, it dominated the 1950s jazz world.

However, Cool Jazz is far from Bebop. In fact, it is a giant contrast of it. Whereas Bebop is fast-paced and ‘pushes’ the rhythm of the song, Cool Jazz was far more relaxed and laid back, hence its name ‘Cool’. Its name itself is given by journalist who took note on the genre’s subdued tune. Indeed, the playing style of this genre is subdued. 

The drums, for example, started playing using brush sticks which were introduced in this era. Brush sticks gave the percussion a much more soft, drizzly texture, unlike Bebop’s harsh, bold, and melody-involved drumming style. This is one of the legacies of Cool Jazz, as it introduced brush sticks which are still used in many jazz shows today.

The players themselves also play in a much more laid-back, slow tempo. This gives the genre a very calm and relaxed atmosphere, which is one of the reasons Cool Jazz is played in cafes today. The dynamics themselves are also softer, with little harsh tones found in Bebop or Swing. This also keeps the genre’s overall volume low and subdued.

Cool Jazz is indeed the next biggest advance in the jazz timeline. It introduces a whole new different playing style that is still used today, and one that influences further genres in the timeline. Above, you will find a great example of what Cool Jazz is, a recording by Dave Brubeck called ‘Take Five’. It is a very well known piece, one that many listeners are familiar with. Therefore, it reflects the characteristics of Cool Jazz very well, as this genre also reintroduced jazz into the mainstream after the fall of Swing. This in turn also allows for jazz’s influence to grow to other musical genre, proving its importance.

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The influences of bebop is indeed very great. It is what makes the growth of jazz much more rapid and varied as we know today. The scales, techniques, rhythms, and arrangements set a standard that many composers use in composing their music in the future. 

As such, the genre of bebop hasn’t really ‘died’ yet, unlike Swing or Dixieland. Its elements can be seen today, and though its founders have passed away long ago, many artists today still utilise techniques found in bebop. The link above explains this importance quite well. Without Bebop, we would not have the genres we know today, like the cool jazz genre’s Take Five by Dave Brubeck, or even fusion jazz.

Here’s a great example of bebop, which showcases the elements explained on this post and the posts below.

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Charlie Parker, better known as the great Yardbird, was one of the lead proponents of Bebop. He introduced a variety of styles in terms of scales, and his work with other proponents of the music also resulted in the development of different playing styles.

One of the greatest impacts Bebop left in the world of jazz is its scales, expanding the musical vocabulary greatly. Bebop scales are known for its basis of standard jazz scales (like the Dorian, Ionian, and the Blues scale| click Here to learn more), with modifications such as augmenting the fifth notes of chord progressions. Jazz scales themselves are indeed very complex, and the Bebop scale is based on these complex scales. This is why Bebop is essentially a genre to be played by musical masters only.

Another great impact Bebop gave is in changing the musical arrangements of jazz performances. For one, jazz drumming became centered solely on the snare and cymbals, reducing bass-drum usages. The double bass is instead charged with maintaining the rhythm of the whole band. The piano also plays in a more ‘feathered’ way compared to previous playing styles. These playing styles are still used today, as the majority of jazz drummers, for instance, plays less on the bass-drum.

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The death of Swing was quite sudden, though it was not unexpected. In the mid-1940s, a musical ban was introduced, preventing Jazz bands from performing or recording for a studio. This was caused due to a disagreement between the musicians and the record producers. In addition, the end of World War 2 also made Swing less-liked, as it reminded the people of the hardships of the war. Thus, its death was inevitable and quick.

At around the same time, bebop became well known to the public. Its development actually started during the Big Band era, when illegal night clubs called speakeasies could not hire Big Bands and could only hire smaller jazz groups. These groups developed a music form that is different to that of the mainstream jazz.

One of the reasons bebop was created was to fight back against the mainstream Swing’s notoriety for its dance-centered songs and its (later on) sole goal to make money. Because of this, musicians started feeling unrespected, which drove them to create bebop. Among the main influentials of this genre was Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Thelonius Monk.

This development in jazz is another great step forward for jazz, introducing it to a more experimental-form and the creation of a more flexible playing style. It was immediately in contrast to that of Swing, thus introducing jazz to its modern less-mainstream format, paving the way for future jazz subgenres centered around bebop.

Click the link above to learn more about bebop, as it explains about its birth quite thoroughly.

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Sing, Sing, Sing. A very famous example of Big Band Swing music, composed by Louis Prima, and performed by the now-famous (1937s) Benny Goodman.

In the recording above, you can hear the distinct characteristics of Swing music. Like all Big Bands, many Swing recordings involved players playing by a written arrangement, in contrast to that of the more free-spirited Dixieland genre. Likewise, the Swing era also introduced individual improvisation, unlike the collective improvisation in Dixieland. What this means is that players would now take turns improvising, instead of improvising together, a style used in many coming genres. Improvisations in Swing involves playing melodies revolving around the chord progressions.

Swing itself also branched out into other sub-genres, most notably the Gypsy Jazz genre created by French Jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt.  This sub-genre infuses Swing music with French Musettes and Eastern European folk music. It also helped introduce Jazz guitar playing styles, as the guitar was extensively used in this sub-genre. Click Here to listen to one of Reinhardt’s compositions.

Another branch this genre created is the Kansas City style, infusing Swing Big Bands into blues elements, creating a more soulful taste. It was partially spearheaded by Count Basie, the famous jazz pianist. Click Here to see Count Basie perform the style with his orchestra.

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Also check out: Duke Ellington’s Take The A Train Glenn Miller’s Chattanooga Choo Choo

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The famous Swing era, however, only began in 1935 with Benny Goodman’s incredibly triumphant performance at the Palomar Ballroom, in Los Angeles. The people who first heard of Benny Goodman’s performances with the Late Night Dance Show radio program, immediately rushed to watch his performance. Citizens of the East-Coast do not know Goodman that well, as the program plays at 11 P.M. EST, which means that it plays in the West Coast at 9 P.M. This is why he was popularised in the West Coast first, not in the East Coast

It’s important to stress that Benny Goodman did not created the first forms of Swing, as the groundwork for this genre has been laid out by musicians like Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington, though his performance was what ushered in the Swing era. It’s also important to note that Big Band is not Swing, as Big Band is more of an arrangement than that of a genre. In fact, Henderson helped Goodman by being his arranger. Goodman’s more adventurous and lively playing style made Henderson’s compositions popular.

Benny Goodman’s orchestra members include Gene Krupa, the man who would popularise the now widely-used Swing rhythm, which is a rhythm based on syncopations of a standard eight-beat rhythm. Basically, the Swing rhythm is akin to that of dividing a straight 8-beat into triplets. Click Here to find out more.

The Swing era was a great step in the evolution of jazz, as it modifies it into a more lively and less-romantic genre. In fact, it is partially based on dance. It also popularized the now-famous Swing rhythm, and gave birth to syncopations in jazz.

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It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.

Tony Bennett and Duke Ellington (Music Title)